Calhoun is an analog to Marx, in other words, in the same way that public choice theory is an analog to the Marxist theory of the state. In the name of freedom, public choice theory would shackle the ninety-nine percent of us who exist in the lower orders of neoliberalism. Public choice theory is the Marxism of the master class.

In order to reclaim the mantle of freedom, we must reclaim the anti-statism of Marxism, the liberty embedded in a theory of freedom for all. It is perfectly understandable why liberals and leftists embraced elements of statism in the twentieth century. The state not only tamed the chaos of a market-based economy that left most people deeply insecure, it also protected the rights of people in dire need of such protection, namely black Americans.

But this is only half the story. If we only focus on this half, we will remain mystified as to why so many people are enthralled with libertarianism. For in addition to civil rights protections, the state is also Vietnam. It is drones, bank bailouts, tax cuts for the wealthy, prisons. The state is Trump. If we want to reclaim the mantle of liberty from the master class and their court intellectuals, we must also reclaim a theory of the state for the masses. And now that Trump is overseeing what looks to be the final capitalist enclosure of state power, the urgent project of democratic revival must hinge on nothing less than the full repudiation of libertarian fantasy in public life.

Contrast Wayne’s legacy with the Trumpworthy approach to Today’s Content. In today’s mediasphere, headlines are crafted not merely to grab eyeballs but to jerk knees and get share-buttons clicked.

And somehow, all the twitching and the Pavlovian sharing is supposed to create a viable personal brand through conspicuous consumption. Except here nothing is actually consumed and certainly nothing is digested; it’s just cooked in short order, plated and passed around till it’s cold and moldy and forgotten. We come hungry to the internet and TV and, occasionally, quaintly, the magazine and the tabloid. We pick something off the menu, rave about it to our friends and kin, then rush off without eating, hungrier than ever. We come to value the appetite more than fullness.

Wayne’s journalism made you sit down and chew your food. Maybe every meal didn’t please your palate, but many more of them did, and you were always happy for the nourishment.

Wayne died the day before Donald John Trump of Queens was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States. Since then—before then, to be honest—I’ve been adrift, dumb, immobile, confounded by my world. And then, a while ago, an editor emailed me to ask me for a piece on Wayne. This all has a point, I swear. I’m just getting to it now.

And so I find myself coming to a very dark hinge moment in this essay. Would I like more Waynes? Sure. But I wouldn’t wish this profession on anyone now, not even the bottom-dwelling jingoists of the fashy cyber-right. We are not fucked because we don’t have enough Waynes. We are fucked because we have a country full of Waynes who don’t have any real, stop-the-capital-M-madness power.

The point is that there are no editorial decisions that aren’t economic decisions. I’m not going to pretend that the old, newspaper-age “church-state separation” between editorial and advertising was magically exempt from a stultifying capitalist logic; it was mostly just a structure that worked to convince enough consumers of a news outlet’s credibility to make it consumable and profitable. That’s not how you establish your journalistic credibility anymore, and it’s certainly not how you make money. You make money, for now, by connecting, via Facebook, to people’s passions and prejudices. You don’t use carrots and sticks on these potential readers: You use sugar, cocaine, molly, Infowars dietary supplements, and a Gorilla Mindset.

as Teresa Hayter points out in Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls, migration, whether political or economic, is not only a human right, but a necessary response to cruelties inflicted by war, inequality, and climate change. So let the nomads, migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, detainees, and the ethnically cleansed, go wherever they’ve got to go. Essential travel’s okay [...]

It’s the leisure travels of the leisured classes that deserve scrutiny. The automatic rush to the computer to book cheap flights—we barely even notice we’re doing it anymore. A long weekend in Guadalajara, a short one in Zagreb, Zimbabwe, or Zeebrugge. The requisite bucket-list prance through a lavender field, a pyramid, a rainforest. A ride on a donkey, dromedary, dolphin, double-decker. . . . We’re such saps! We’ve been fed a bunch of fake reasons to travel by evil geniuses determined to use up all the fossil fuels as fast as possible, so as to coerce us all into accepting nuclear power as soon as possible. We galumph across the earth at their bidding, getting ourselves into all kinds of scrapes. We get lost, we starve, we hang off cliffs, we struggle with unfamiliar plumbing arrangements and foreign currency. But do they care?

People are rewarded with large financial bonuses and promotions for academic and business trips, and therefore learn to crave them, and to crow about how many they’ve been on. The assumption is that travel is automatically fun, worthwhile, and enviable: a status symbol. But really all that’s happened is that these questionably important people (more lemmings than locusts, and therefore to be pitied) spent twenty-eight hours in airplanes and airports, twelve hours drinking, an hour or two at a dull meeting or under-attended talk, and a few hours playing golf or fucking a drunk business colleague, assistant professor, or total stranger.

And thanks to this same networked mutually reinforcing matrix of digital age capital, the traditional lessons of punctured asset bubbles also failed to take hold in the wake of the mortgage sector’s implosion. Capital demanded austerity, even as every sane measure of a sustainable mass recovery called for deficit spending on an enormous scale. Even after the desperate bailout of the global financial sector, the degree of leverage that capital exercises today is so great—and so unprecedented in history—that capital is no longer simply a leading sector of economic activity, but the only sector that matters. Hedge fund assets have gone from $39 billion in 1990 to around $1.5 trillion in 2008 to $3 trillion in 2016. Nonfinancial institutions have become financialized—a process well under way throughout the globalized neoliberal regime—to the point that in the United States, institutional investors have gone from owning 47 percent of the top thousand companies in 1973 to owning 73 percent in 2014. The five biggest U.S. banks owned 45 percent of assets in 2015 (a total of $7 trillion), compared to 25 percent in 2008, even as 1,400 small banks disappeared.

Can we imagine civilization functioning in any recognizable form if we pull the plug on capital? We have reached a point where, far from conceptualizing a mode of life not dependent on capital as AI, we cannot even imagine a situation where capital’s power can be regulated; no country on earth is currently succeeding in this venture, though some, particularly in Latin America, have recently tried.

Capital has become so autonomous (the mind-boggling numbers reflect the power that stems from this autonomy) that the state as we knew it has ceased to exist as a competing power. The state, to the extent that finance dominates every decision the state makes, has become absorbed in capital. The state is merely part of the external architecture capital has learned, very intelligently, to maneuver around, with the eventual aim of extinguishing it.

Governments all over the world are indulging in the same form of statistical imagination, as surpluses are directed away from public goods into handling debt—creating debt and paying it off—a never-ending cycle that has nothing to do with public policy as we have understood it. Time, space, and life—the future of the earth itself—are encoded as statistical probabilities where former conceptions of alienation and belonging have no meaning. All communication becomes encoded within the parameters of this abstract information-gathering which presents itself as the only available form of rationality.

Capital as AI is the paramount myth of our time. We are no longer in possession of any competing myths of space and time. Financial expertise has become a primary linguistic domain, the speed of circulation of virtual money makes all previous spheres of value irrelevant, and we succumb to the languages of data and explanation from within the fully functioning AI system that we know as capital. [...]